1. Technical Field
This invention is directed toward a system and process for digital image processing. More particularly, the invention is directed toward an efficient method for editing images over a network.
2. Background Art
Digital cameras are becoming popular and their sales have increased rapidly in recent years. Since digital cameras have become so popular, there has been an increased desire to share the photos taken with these cameras between family members, friends and coworkers. Business use of these images has also increased dramatically. Digital images are frequently used in marketing materials, technical papers, reports and Internet websites. The evolution of the Internet, and its increased global use, coupled with the increased popularity of electronic mail, has made image sharing easier. However, digital image sharing over a network such as the Internet has its disadvantages.
Digital images are typically bitmap files that have very large data sizes as compared with text files. As a result, digital images consume a huge amount of hard drive space. In addition, their large file size makes digital image data files consume large amounts of computer resources and network bandwidth to process and transmit them over a network. Image data transmission rates are typically very slow as a result. Hence, it is important to reduce the amount of computer memory consumed and data transmission time to transfer such digital images by creating a way to reduce image data size.
Another aspect of digital image sharing is the quality of the images shared and used in various applications. People often seek to improve images themselves or collaboratively with others. Image-editing software, that improves the quality of digital images, has therefore also become quite popular. In a traditional darkroom, image quality is controlled with choices of films, chemicals, papers and processes. In the digital equivalent of the darkroom, images are edited with a computer system and a photo-editing program. Just as in a traditional darkroom, the quality of the digital tools has an impact on the quality of the images achieved. Digital images can be edited in a wide variety of ways using photo-editing software. In some cases an editing program is used to improve an image by eliminating or reducing its flaws. For example, some photo-editing operations that improve a digital image include: cropping, adjusting brightness and contrast, correcting color balance, adjusting color saturation, filtering, converting color images to black and white, hand coloring black and white photos, eliminating red eye, and resizing an image to different resolutions.
When images are collaboratively improved, the images are often sent back and forth over a network between people iteratively editing the images. The large size of the data causes data transmission delays and consumes large amounts of computer processing resources and hard drive space. This can make this iterative editing process quite cumbersome.